Quotes by American Authors - Page 1789

Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.
Julie Lythcott-Haims
it is so dark now with the sadness ofpeoplethey were tricked, they were taught to expect theultimate when nothing ispromisednow young girls weep alone in small roomsold men angrily swing their canes atvisions asladies comb their hair asants search for survivalhistory surrounds usand our livesslink awayinshame.
Charles Bukowski
I should stay to be sure she doesn't have a concussion. And that she doesn't need sex for it. Or just to be there in case she did . . .
Robyn Carr
Just as the rain carries positive ions, so does change make you more apt to experience love with an expansive heart.
Julieanne O'Connor
With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.
Robert Farrar Capon
But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did–he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve.As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way–like the moon.
Tao Lin
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
Carl Sagan
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.
Anaïs Nin
Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.
Katharine Hepburn
We will understand the depth of our vision when at some point we are finally faced with the price we must pay to achieve it. And when the price comes calling, most visions end up falling.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Other people can’t cause us to be impatient unless we let them do so. In other words, others don’t make us impatient. We make ourselves impatient, through our expectations and demands, fixated attachments and stuckness.
Lama Surya Das
A bore is a man who spends so much time talking about himself that you can't talk about yourself.
Melville Landon
Worries flee before a spirit of gratitude.
Billy Graham
To know a species, look at its fears. To know yourself, look at your fears. Fear in itself is not important, but fear stands there and points you in the direction of things that are important. Don't be afraid of your fears, they're not there to scare you; they're there to let you know that something is worth it.
C. JoyBell C.
Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.
Dimitri A. Bogazianos
With enough coffee anything is possible
Karen Salmansohn
Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
Anne Rice
Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.
Jonathan Feldman
We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.
Siri Hustvedt
I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell's observation that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." page 546
Robert M. Gates
A beautiful white silk scarf was around her neck, tucked below the fur collar. Her lips were well painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Cute as hell I always told myself, with a tinge of regret. She had a steady girlfriend.
Paul A. Myers
If I had one wish, it would be for self-drying pants. Wait -- no! Unlimited wishes! How do I return these stupid pants?!
Stephen Colbert
I like the way you touch me.""I like to touch you... That works out for us, huh?
Jeffrey Brown
I didn't fall in love with you tate, I flew..
Colleen Hoover
I fold my hands under my head and tell the books all about you. They listen, Beck. I know it sounds crazy, but they do.
Caroline Kepnes
Presidents Trump's USA is not a good country to be a sickly person in.
Steven Magee
I'll go," he said."And that's safer because?""I'm a guy.""Right, and having a pair of dingle balls makes you invincible how?
Gemma Halliday
Women have to be in the mood for sex. Men have to be breathing.
Lois Greiman
When you are avoiding your pain you are really only avoiding your growth.
Bryant McGill
When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Theodore Dreiser
I hear you're quite the writer. Quite the teacher's pet.""I... I don't know what you mean.""No? The maybe you're in for a surprise. A maybe it won't be a nice one."Kate heard her voice lashing out, braver than she felt."I don't know what you're talking about. But nothing that pertains to me is any of your business.'The match hissed again. She saw his black, black eyes flickering."You're right. How inconsiderate of me."Shaken, Kate willed her feet to move her forward."You should be more careful," Pearce said. "Anyone could find your key. Anyone could get into your cabin."Kate whirled to face him. "I have a roommate. I'm not alone.""A roommate?" And he sounded like he was smiling... a dark strange smile as if she'd said something particularly funny. "If someone wanted to get you," Pearce said slowly, and another match went out, "a roommate wouldn't stop them. They'd just get you. Wouldn't they?
Richie Tankersley Cusick
If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world.
Helen Keller
I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Mark Twain
Everybody told me this 'girl on the piano' thing was never going to work.
Tori Amos
I don't care who kissed you first, as long as I kissed you last - George (If we kiss)
Rachel Vail
Check thyself before thy wreck thyself.
Tyler Oakley
Oceans are vast and almost bottomless. You dance in the rain Elizabeth. You drown in the sea.
Jennifer Rush
He looks at Mr. Vacanti and the man looks back at him with somehow gentle eyes. It surprises David to see the man has gentle eyes. It surprises him, even at thirty-seven, to discover that monsters can have gentle eyes. Something is terribly wrong with a world where monsters are allowed to have gentle eyes.
Ryan David Jahn
[A dog is] a bundle of pure love, gift-wrapped in fur.
Andrea Lochen
The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible
William S Burroughs
I was pure, before you defiled me, and don't you forget it. As though the concept of purity is anything more than the construct of selfish, competitive men stampeding toward the women to call dibs. I'll be damned if I'm not worth stampeding toward, but the prize had better be me, hymen or no hymen.
Thomm Quackenbush
It’s better to live in hell with the wise than in heaven with the wicked.
Debasish Mridha
In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.
Laurie Halse Anderson
You are being fashioned into one of two images, either God's or the worlds. Make a choice!
Jim George
Second rule of the bush. Never get too close to anything that has offspring.What's the first rule?Food runs. If you don't want to be food, don't run.
Deanna Raybourn
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.
Diane Arbus
The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.
Criss Jami
Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. ‘What is the egg to the eagle?’ he asked me…
Bernard Cornwell
None of them knew the color of the sky.
Stephen Crane
Forgive yourself when you fall down because we all fall down.
Toni Sorenson
Why should we labor this unpleasant point? Because the Book of Mormon labors it, for our special benefit. Wealth is a jealous master who will not be served halfheartedly and will suffer no rival--not even God: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." (Matthew 6:24) In return for unquestioning obedience wealth promises security, power, position, and honors, in fact anything in this world. Above all, the Nephites like the Romans saw in it a mark of superiority and would do anything to get hold of it, for to them "money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes 10:19) "Ye do always remember your riches," cried Samuel the Lamanite, ". . .unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities." (Helaman 13:22) Along with this, of course, everyone dresses in the height of fashion, the main point being always that the proper clothes are expensive--the expression "costly apparel" occurs 14 times in the Book of Mormon. The more important wealth is, the less important it is how one gets it.
Hugh Nibley
We are the last generation with a real opportunity to save the world.
Laurence Overmire
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.
Anne Rice
Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible they begin to see it as possible.
Cherie Carter-Scott
A relationship is the union of two psychological systems.
Sharon Salzberg
A great discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery.
George Pólya
Your mother can’t hear you here.” t“Distance is no match for my mother’s eavesdropping and mind-reading skills.”t“I had steel anti-mind-reading plates installed this week. Specially designed to be Marilyn-proof. Also sounds an alarm if she gets within two hundred yards of the building, and I sent the guards downstairs to ninja training. You’re safe.
Jamie Farrell
After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.
Carson McCullers
I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is they would say if they are honest that it is a big department store with new things every week - all the money to buy them and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
Erich Fromm
You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.
Toni Morrison